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Comment by jrsdav | Hacker News Reader

I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself. The thinking that it's a conveyer belt where we put our children "on-rails" for 6 hours a day and they'll come out the other side with a strong education and high test scores. This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory. Workers who don't even get paid a livable wage but yet have to front the cash for tools just to do the job.

Absent from your comment is the reality of just how much a shit job it is to be a teacher under normal circumstances, with the pandemic being unequivocally abnormal. Teachers are still stuck in this whirlwind trying to figure out how to teach in the post-pandemic ruins that's not just our education system, but our public sentiment that is bursting with shitty expectations.

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The problem here is we are required by law to pay taxes for schools, and the people running the schools have almost zero accountability on anything.

In our tiny regional district, the yearly school budget is $25 million a year, for less than a thousand students. Our combined municipal budgets, by comparison, are about $6 million.

For that $25 million a year, we are forced to pay, we get crap teachers and kids who can’t read or do math.

We are now in private school, for a total of $25,000 a year we pay ourselves, and we still have to pay the school taxes too.

It is absolutely outrageous.

You know what’s truly amazing is that in some states, a person like me (no kids) pays taxes into your kid’s private school. If it seems nuts that you have to pay twice to get one quality service, imagine how I feel about paying once for a kid to go to religious school.

Agreed on the outrageous part, though!

Not all private schools are religious schools.

Correct. I'm not sure I have a huge problem with non-religious schools, but on the other hand I'm not really sure to whom they're accountable or how they spend that money. I am not completely sold.

Charter Schools seem to often have trouble maintaining financially viable operations, let alone outcompeting other schools despite being able to pick and choose what students they accept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_htSPGAY7I

It's been messy to watch this play out in Portland, the quality of education delivered is not consistent and each charter school (or chain) is on its own to reinvent the wheel (and waste resources doing so) on common infrastructure many districts would otherwise share.

The myth of common infrastructure is a common theme in schools. Our own district “regionalized” across three towns to get those infrastructure savings.

They were non-existent.

The reality, in NJ at least, is that a school’s budget will balloon to the maximum size legally allowed, and expand from there forever. On occasions when stupid BOE’s back themselves into a corner, they rook the residents into a referendum to get a zillion dollar bond.

The common theme in public schools is: mandatory funding via taxation, and no accountability at all.

That is not true when your looking at IT infrastructure, connecting to the state K-12 network, qualifying for connectivity grants, etc.

The cost to do this for an individual school is much greater than spreading these primarily fixed over many schools.

I am not sure what a “state k-12 network” is. I don’t think such a thing exists in NJ.

I have looked at our budgets, IT is almost a rounding error out of the $25 million/year.

Most of the “synergy” of combining schools is supposed to come out of reduced administrative personnel.

Except that never happen. Quite the opposite - administration swells and the combined regional district ends up costing more.

Public charter schools in Oregon (and most other states) are not able to pick and choose what students they accept. As long as they have space they have to take any student in the district who applies, and if they are short of space then slots are allocated by lottery.

Well, unfortunate that the school is religious, but I wouldn’t say that a childless person paying for school is “outrageous.”

After all, most people grow old, retire, and become dependent on the young workers in the economy to carry the tax burden, defend the nation, serve as doctors, nurses, caretakers, and so on.

It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes children to have a village at all. So I don’t think it’s crazy if we spread the cost of education not just among parents but across the whole population.

The point was that the taxes are going to private schools, not schools in general.

I wouldn't say that a childless person paying for school is "outrageous" either. If I said that, would I be entitled to a doctor when I'm old?

The better we educate these little people the better the future will be. Letting people take this money that we set aside to invest in the future seems unwise.

One other point that may be worth making is that if the kids I rely on to take care of me when I am old are very religious, they will probably not take care of me, which gives me a vested interest in the undertaking of teaching the next generations not to hate me because I don’t share their beliefs.

You will depend on today's children to uphold society and care for you in your old age, so asking you to contribute to their education is perfectly reasonable

not necessarily true. I'm an antinatalist planning to kill myself once I get too old to take care of myself on my own. There are many people who are childless because they believe that making children to take care of our selfish needs is horribly wrong.

There will be people managing your deceased body.... and remaining posessions.

You will require children to push you off the building when you want to die though.

How about we fix that problem instead by eliminating the Ponzi scheme that is social security?

Older generations depend on the young for everything not just social security.

The private school charges you the same amount for one student that the public school has to spend -- but doesn't need to support expensive or difficult cases.

How can you then claim that public schools are somehow massively inefficient?

Private schools are acutely aware that you are paying them to educate your kid, and have mobility if you are unhappy. The result is higher efficiency.

Public schools are effectively a monopoly with a captive audience,and in NJ at least, no true accountability. The result is they spend money on all sorts of crap having little to nothing to do with education.

NJ has overall decent schools that are well funded with huge local control in many areas broken up into an insane number of small towns. The kicker is all children need to have a minimum education regardless of cost - so if an educational plan needs multiple teachers following a student cost is no factor and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The richer towns subsidize some of the poorer towns as well. I think that if a private school were to get any public funds at all they immediately should also be required to at no extra cost to the sender have the same requirements with out being able to get rid of problem children.

Is your concern that you pay money to educate other people’s children? What is outrageous about that?

Public schools have less accountability than private schools. Because the one local government is the customer for public schools, and the student is the customer for private schools. Parents have more micro accountability actions than governments.

> I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself.

Are there any other countries that don't rely heavily on public education? Europe seems to lean on schools even more for shaping society, especially Swiss schools, which aggressively integrate immigrants into a common Swissness model. China, well, not 6 hours, maybe 8 hours, and boarding schools are common, see mom and dad on the weekend. They probably weathered COVID better than we did, however, just given that they went to back school much earlier or never left.

Families with more resources/education did OK during COVID, the real negative effects were felt in lesser resourced families, who depended on the schools more and weren't able to provide alternatives because they had to work their non-WFH friendly jobs.

Of course the teachers weren't the perpetrators here, I'm not sure the unions were either (I don't equate teachers with teacher unions, its not like they have so much choice in union representation).

>This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory.

Even if the workers in the factory made faulty parts, in the United States, it would be incredibly hard to fire the workers. Their are no incentives on either side, for the worker nor the student. Their needs to be higher pay to attract people to want to do the job.

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